Saturday, November 10, 2007

Latin Mass Draws Interest After Easing of Restrictions - New York Times -- My dad was a convert to Catholicism during Word War II. We kids always assumed he converted in deference to and to please my mother, his sweetheart and schoolmate at Cleveland Heights High who lived in a house with big sycamores on Grandview, right behind his house on Bellfield. Talking to him towards the end of his life, a few years ago, we were surprised to find out that he became a Roman Catholic not because of mom but because of the ritual and the pageantry of the Mass per se, the old ceremony that reached out and grabbed him one Sunday in the Pacific, when a friend invited him to Mass.

Now here comes that same old ritual and pageantry back at us with the pope's giving blanket permission to revive the Latin Mass locally, on an ad hoc basis. I wonder if we sixty-somethings will be pressed into service as altar boys again until the younger generations get up to speed? Et introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.As I skimmed over the NYT article, a name from the past popped up, and I had to go to my alumni directory to validate the fact that Father Baldovin and I were contemporaries at the College of the Holy Cross in the '60s, and we were. The fact that we had to attend mandatory daily Mass with sign-in cards for our first few years there may account for the fact that he seems less than enthusiastic about the promise of this Latin-Mass revival. Personally, I'm really looking forward to it, but I wasn't permanently emotionally scarred by the daily sign-in experience; I never took it too seriously and got a lot of napping and/or homework done.

If you need to brush up, or check it out for the first time, you can do so here.